A Simple Company Website Can Be A Great Marketing Strategy For Your Startup

Author: Eashani Rodrigo

It is important for the startup businesses to think about when to start marketing their business. In fact, this is a common question that every startup face after setting up their company.

Here is a recommendation - start the marketing of your business with a simple and effective company website. A simple company website can be a great marketing strategy that can benefit your business in short and long term, and here is why: 

• It is efficient and cost-effective:

Generally, the marketing budget of any startup is limited; therefore, it is important for every startup to think about efficient and low cost marketing strategies to build a long-term sustainable business. Building a company website is a low cost yet effective marketing strategy that can integrate with many other online marketing strategies focusing on short- or long-term goals. For an instance: a company can decide to use online advertising as a strategy to giveaway discounted coupons as a promotional campaign focused on short-term sales increments. By integrating the website with the online advertising strategy, company can use their website as the source to distribute coupons to the customers who click on the ads.

Moreover, a website is a great marketing channel to provide information that consumers demand, as well as it is an effective tool to market company products and services. For an example Wal-Mart Stores the world’s largest retailer, use their ecommerce website to provide individual product information for the consumers allowing them to purchase online with delivery or order items online and pick them up in store.

• Online presence of your company is important: 

According to an analysis conducted by Forbs, the global number of internet users has reached 2,923 million by year 2014 and that is nearly 40% of world population. This is why your online presence is important.

Your company’s online presence creates a virtual identity for your business, and acts as a reference point for the public to learn about you, and to reach you. A website is the key to build that online presence, and this is where you can start building your company image. Moreover, your online presence has the capability to equalize your company with your industry competitors. Just think about it, as consumers we all have a perception in our mind – ‘if a company have a great website, it is a well running company regardless of its size’.

• Your website is the central component of businesses’ digital strategy

Your website can act as the hub for your digital strategy. Many online companies use this as a main strategy to drive their sales (e.g. Amazon, eBay). For them, their website is the core component of their business existence. While they have their e-commerce website as the core of their business, they use different online marketing strategies to drive traffic to their company website. For an instance, integration of online marketing strategies such as content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, affiliate marketing and display advertising to direct visitors to their website. Once a potential customer visits the website, it acts as the source to provide information and to persuade the customer to make the buying decision.  Similarly, any company can use this strategy to drive visitors to their website by integrating all other online marketing strategies with the central component – which is the company website.

•  Reach customers worldwide

Either your target market is local or international, you can use your website to target any customer base dispersed geographically, or limited to your focused geographical area. Using language customization option in your website allows you to target different consumer categories in international as well as in local market.

• Consumers demand information to make their buying decision 

The simple traditional buying process has become complicated with the new information era. A study conducted by McKinsey – ‘The consumer decision journey”- concluded that, when consumers decide to make a purchase they no longer proceed in a linear "purchasing funnel" process, but in a circular process. According to the new process, information plays a vital role in the consumer decision journey.

Prior to any buying decision consumers strongly rely on the information they gather through the internet and other sources. They search and compare available suppliers in the market, competitor products, value added services and existing customer reviews, before making any buying decision. Therefore, information play a critical role in the decision making process of the consumer.

Just think yourself as a consumer who wishes to buy a musical instrument from a musical instruments shop in your area. What would be the steps you follow? First, you would search the internet for the musical instruments shops in your area.  Then you would visit their websites and compare brands and prices of the available instruments mentioned in the website. Your attention will draw more towards the websites that have images of the musical instruments with their specific details and the prices. This information can be persuasive, as it can influence you to change your preference of the brand, design or the price, and even the seller you initially had in your mind. Finally, once you made the decision on the seller and the product you want to buy you would look for the contact details of the seller to go for a purchase or to make an inquiry.

This would be the same psychology of your consumers; therefore, use your website to provide all the information that consumers demand - it will help them to make an easy buying decision and to choose your company over your competitors.

• Build your reputation

Your company website can be used not only to market your services and products but also to market your company - in other words to build your company reputation. Make your website a communication channel to convey information to the public about your company background, company management, affiliations, achievements, client base, success stories, and even customer testimonials. This can build your company reputation and its public image.

IS Project Risk Management: Risk Factors in IS Project Management

Author: Eashani Rodrigo

The success of a project depends on how it is being managed. Organizations across different industries use formal project management methodologies and best practices for the successful management of their various projects. One of the most critical project management functions is the ‘Project Risk Management’. Every project comes with inevitable risk factors that impact the success of the project. In any project management environment, either it is construction, information technology, telecommunications and financial services etc., proper project risk management should be followed in order to reduce and eliminate possible unexpected project risks and to help resolving problems if they occurred.

According to Schwalbe (2009), risks are “uncertain events that may occur to the detriment or enhance of the project”, therefore the project risk management is aimed at “minimizing negative risk events and maximizing positive events”. In recent years, with the increasing complexity of the projects and changing business environments, the uncertainty of the project outcomes is in continual increase. This has resulted in making the risk management an important function in project management. Many researchers have found that process of risk management is a critical function for the success of the projects and it is essential to the development of profitability, especially in large-scale projects. To achieve success in IT projects, the IT (Information Technology) industry is increasingly adopting risk management processes in their IS (Information Systems) project management practices.

In IS project management, risk management involves all processes concerned with risk identification, risk analysis, and response to project risks. From these processes, most critical process is considered as the ‘risk identification’ or identifying the risk factors; which is the first step in managing successful IS development risks. Even though there are considerable attempts of academics to identify, classify, and compare IS project risk factors, there are not enough evidence to support the idea that industry practices use these frameworks in practical project management. Industry experts argue that these IS project risk factors identified by academics are not always applicable in the practical scenarios and there are other aspects to be considered when identifying IS project risks.

By studying the project risk related academic literature, industry practices and industry case studies, it was evident that academic risk identification frameworks have been updated periodically due to the increasing complexity of the projects. Initially the risk factors’ was on the project resources such as people, process and technology and the internal factors of organizations that can affect the project. However, as the complexity and the inter-dependencies of factors have increased, the researchers have attempted to identify framework and structures that present all possible risk factors in IS projects. These factors have focused not only internal factors but also external factors such as Commercial and legal relationships, Economic circumstances and Political circumstances. Therefore, due to complexity of the project the academic frameworks continued on updating on the risk identification categories to support the practical adoption of these frame works in to the different industry contexts.

Moreover, it was seen that projects risk factors can change depending on the cultural and organizational factors. Each country may have additional unique set of risk factors that needs to be considered in cultural and organizational aspects. They have also identified that in practical IS project risk management, most organizations focus mainly on the technical issues of the project and tend to neglect people aspects when identifying risk factors, which leads to IS project failure. Therefore, in practical context the organizations should focus on all aspects of risk identification categorizations without solely focusing on technical aspects.

In practical scenario of project management, there are common risk factors or frameworks that can be adopted by practitioners; however, still there are unique risk factors to different countries based on their socio-economic context. Therefore, all these aspects should be considered when identifying risk factors in different IT project in practical context. Moreover, the common risks factors may have different impact on various countries and various projects, therefore the risk identification should be carried out individually for each project considering all the possible aspects depending on the context. 

As the final note, current industry practices adopt common risk identification frameworks for their IS project risk management practices and there are common risk factors that are similar to the industry identified risk factors. However, the success of adoption of these frameworks are questionable as there are unique risk factors that can majorly impact the IS project. Therefore, in practical IS project risk identification practices, the project managers should consider the common risk factors as well the unique risk factors that can impact the specific project. However, there can be implications when identifying unique risk factors in practical IS project management in different context. The complexity of the project and lack of knowledge in every aspect of the project or the context may limit the successful identification of accurate risk factors. Another implication is the time limitation. The risk identification is the time consuming process, the project stakeholder involvement in project risk identification and the requirement to consider many aspects of the project may not be practical with the project time-frames.

Read the full industry research essay here. 

References

Schwalbe, K. (2009) Introduction to Project Management, 2nd edn. Boston, Mass.: Course Technology.